Akamai interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Akamai software engineering interview across 3 levels and 13 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Akamai salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Engineer I (0-2 yrs)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks

  1. Round 0: HackerRank Online Assessment

    Assessment · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: A message was encoded by mapping A=1 ... Z=26 and concatenating the digits (so "226" could be "BZ", "VF" or "BBF"). Given the digit string, count how many distinct letter decodings exist.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview (DSA + web/networking basics)

    Phone · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live interview · HackerRank CodePair

    Sample question: Find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters. Follow-up discussion: which HTTP methods are idempotent, and why does idempotency matter when a proxy or CDN edge retries a request?

  3. Round 2: Managerial Round

    Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  4. Round 3: HR Round

    Behavioral · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Engineer II (2-5 yrs)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks

  1. Round 0: Recruiter Screen

    Phone · ~20-30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (2-3 DSA problems)

    Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: You are given request logs as (start_ts, end_ts) pairs for connections through an edge server. Return the maximum number of connections that were open simultaneously.

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 1 (DSA deep dive)

    Phone · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Given a rooted tree as (parent, child) edges and two nodes u and v, find their lowest common ancestor. Follow-up: how would you answer many LCA queries efficiently?

  4. Round 3: Technical Interview 2 (DSA + networking/SQL)

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Walk through everything that happens when a browser fetches an image served via a CDN: DNS resolution, TCP and TLS handshakes, edge cache hit vs miss and revalidation. Then write a SQL query returning the top 5 customers by total bytes served from a requests(customer_id, bytes) table.

  5. Round 4: Managerial / Behavioral Round

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Senior Software Engineer

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / Hiring Manager Screen

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Problem-Solving Round (HackerRank IDE)

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Given an m x n grid containing only '0' and '_', produce the grid where every region of '_' cells completely surrounded by '0' (not touching the border) is converted to '0'.

  3. Round 2: System Design + Code Quality

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a food aggregator service like Swiggy/Zomato: restaurant catalog with search, cart and order placement, live delivery tracking. Discuss where a CDN and edge caching fit, and how you keep the catalog read path fast during dinner-peak load.

  4. Round 3: Final Round (technical recap + behavioral)

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.